With a maximum speed of only five hundred miles per hour—many airliners fly faster—the S-3 Viking wasn’t about to be the subject of any movies starring Tom Cruise. However, the long-legged Jets proved extremely useful in a very wide variety of roles, whether as an electronic spy, submarine hunter, aerial tanker, cargo plane or even an attack jet. And many of those roles have not been satisfactorily replaced since. (nationalinterest.org) 기타...

Our military, for more than three decades now, has been on a "shock & awe" kick. Fast and flashy has become preferred over slow and steady. Where before we crushed foes under the sheer ponderous weight of our forces, nowadays the goal is to look good on the news clips first and foremost. Hell, you could say it started with replacing the venerable old 1911A1 .45 ACP with the flashy 9mm Beretta but it goes back further than that. We always want the newest and shiniest toys, the ones with great PR departments pushing them, making them seem to be the answer to problems that didn't exist, but damn they look sweet! It all comes down to advertising. Advertising the equipment to those buying it, advertising the conflicts to those actually paying for it, and advertising the results to those who cast votes for it, all to a rousing audio track and lots of spectacular and colorful video.

I think it's about time we stopped listening to the rattle of the stick in the swill bucket and started paying more attention to what we actually NEED, vs what's being sold to us.

For a large part of it, no. There's several other aircraft doing the job, but with pros and cons. The SH-60 helicopters, short-range. The retiring P-3 and the new P-8, but neither is carrier-based. And the super hornets have the refueling buddy duty, but don't hold quite the tank-load. And the C-2 Greyhound is still doing COD, but won't last much longer, and the Navy chose the V-22 to takes it's place with a short range and higher operating cost. Most of the decision making is non-sense. Bernie's first comment up above, nails it.